rc3.org

Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: September 1999 (page 1 of 9)

Yeah, I know it seems like I link to an article from Salon almost every day, but the fact is that they publish a lot of thought provoking articles. Today, they’re running an article about Apple’s ignoring their own human interface guidelines in favor of marketing for QuickTime, and the implications of that for the Apple platform. The idea of Apple eschewing their interface guidelines, the hallmark of the platform, makes me slackjawed.

Amazon.com has thrown down the gauntlet in front of low end store hosting sites. Analysts can’t seem to agree on whether this is a good thing or bad thing for Amazon. I still go to Amazon.com to shop for books, but I haven’t investigated any of their other offerings. The fact that the bookstore is no longer the front page is nothing more than an irritant to me, I don’t care what else is on it.

There’s a buffer overflow in Microsoft’s pathetic telnet client that will allow a third party to execute arbitrary commands on your computer. This bug affects users of Windows 95 and Windows 98. Malicious people can create a web page that executes your telnet client and runs the commands of their choosing … there’s a CIAC security bulletin about it. The Unix community has spent years trying to excise buffer overflows from common programs, and is still working on it. It seems that people are just getting started finding the buffer overflows in Windows, and we have to rely on Microsoft to fix them.

It’s amazing to me how brittle the Internet still is. There’s just not enough cable in the ground carrying Internet traffic to provide acceptable levels of redundancy for a “carrier class” network. Yesterday, four OC-192 cables in Ohio got sliced, delaying traffic between the East and West coast.

NewsMaps.com presents the news in an interesting alternative format. The site has a very useful Quick Tour that will enable you to make sense of what’s going on there.

The CIA is trying to put its finger on the pulse of the computer industry by starting its own venture capital fund, called In-Q-It. They’re even going to have an office on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto with all of the other venture capitalists.

Chip Salzenberg (a member of the Perl core team) is rewriting Perl in C++. The project is called Topaz, and seems to be progressing fairly slowly. The result of the project will be Perl 6. The article begins with a comparison of the programming languages they could have used, which is interesting if the comparative benefits of various programming languages fascinates you.

Well, it looks like NSI has agreed to, in the words of Eric Cartman, respect ICANN’s authori-tie. What that really means, the article doesn’t say. NSI is also going to allow competing domain name registrars, but still maintain the sole registry. In other words, the incompetent jerks still hold the keys to the castle.

Rebecca Blood pointed to this fascinating story about some nuclear waste up in Washington state. It’s illustrates clearly how people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing can really screw things up when they try to solve problems.

USA Today has a story about the dilemna facing “socially responsible” mutal funds that invest in Microsoft. If they lose their antitrust suit, is it socially responsible to keep your money in Microsoft stock?

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